News
SCILLS win its first research grant
Although SCILLS has just been launched, it has already obtained its first externally funded research grant. Medical Research Council Technology, the commercial arm of the UK’s Medical Research Council has awarded SCILLS a grant of £250,000 from its Developmental Gap Funding Scheme. This grant will pay the salaries of the four members of the Protein Production and Assay Development Team (PPADT) of SCILLS for the next two years. The initial goal of the PPADT is to produce a critical mass of the proteins of the ubiquitin system that will be required by the research teams in the Protein Ubiquitination Unit and for commercial collaborations with service providers in this rapidly expanding area of research. The PPADT will also set up and develop assays to measure the activities of these proteins.
The Head of the PPADT will be Dr Axel Knebel. For the past six years, Axel has been the CEO of Kinasource, a company he founded to exploit a novel method he developed to identify the substrates of protein kinases while he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Philip Cohen’s laboratory from 1998-2002. Axel therefore will be renewing his partnership with the founding Director of SCILLS.
University of Dundee